Intervention details

ReflectED

Intervention description

ReflectED is an approach to learning, developed by Rosendale Primary school, that teaches and develops primary school children’s metacognition skills (their ability to think about and manage their own learning). This includes the skills of setting and monitoring goals, assessing progress, and identifying personal strengths and challenges.

ReflectED consists of 28 weekly half-hour lessons, which teach pupils strategies they can use to monitor and manage their own learning. Pupils are supported to apply and practise these strategies throughout the rest of the curriculum; reflect on their learning; and record audio, photographed and written notes of their reflections in a digital portfolio on Evernote, a note-taking app. Pupils are then encouraged to review and reflect on these records over time, so that they can observe their progress and consider which strategies seemed to work well. Teachers can also look across these records to get an overview of the areas that pupils are enjoying or struggling with, and identify specific pupil needs. For example, a teacher could explore the notes that a pupil has tagged as “maths” and “difficult” to see which ones they struggled with, and examine which strategies seemed to help them with this.

Professional development/training

Teachers can freely access a wide range of materials on the ReflectED website, including lesson plans, classroom resources and supporting films. Face to face training is available to schools who are new to ReflectED and want additional support.

Evidence Summary

The Education Endowment Foundation recently ran a project investigating the effectiveness of ReflectED, which found that it had a positive impact on maths attainment in KS2, but no impact on English attainment in KS2.

The study found mean effect sizes of -0.15 in primary reading and +0.30 for primary maths. All pupils who participated developed a less positive attitude towards reading than the control group.

Strongfor Primary maths

No. of studies1

No. of students1,858

Average effect size+0.30

No impactfor Primary reading

No. of studies1

No. of students1,858

Average effect size-0.15

Key research

The Education Endowment Foundation are now running a further project to evaluate the impact of the approach on a larger scale, the results should be available in spring 2020.